1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing unit and a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printer of a dot impact type is known as a printer used for a timestamp or the like. The printer of this type includes a carriage that reciprocatingly moves in a row direction, a printing head mounted on the carriage, and a cartridge mounted on the carriage and having an ink ribbon housed therein (see, for example, Japanese Patent No. 2791350 (Patent Literature 1)).
The printer performs printing on a recording medium by hitting head pins of the printing head against the recording medium via the ink ribbon in a process in which the carriage reciprocatingly moves in the row direction on the recording medium.
However, the printer described in Patent Literature 1 performs the printing only while the carriage moves on a forward path. Therefore, an information amount that can be printed in one reciprocating movement is limited. In general, in the printer used for the timestamp or the like, printing is performed in a state in which a recording medium is fixed. Therefore, the recording medium cannot be conveyed in a column direction orthogonal to the row direction.
Therefore, there is still room of improvement of marketability.